Adultery & Other Choices Read Online Free Page B

page; they made no sense to him. He began to hate the notes themselves, the way they sat inscrutable and arrogant on the stern bars which he didn’t understand either. At times he thought he was simply stupid; he would have preferred that to the truth which sometimes surfaced in his mind: that while he and Eddie sat before Brother Eugene tapping the music sheets with his baton, tapping their horns with his baton, sometimes tapping their knuckles and hands with his baton, Paul was not there: he watched himself looking at the notes; he listened to himself trying to blow them; and all the time he was in suspension, waiting. He was waiting for something to happen. One afternoon he would all at once love the horn, he would know and love the notes, and his lips would blow sweet silver. Or one day someone would steal his horn. Or the school would burn to the ground or Brother Eugene would drop dead.
    On the first night he practiced at home his father said it sounded like a bullfrog. Paul said it was hard to get the lips right. He played every night for the first two weeks, making sounds that had nothing to do with the notes he glared at on the sheet, wanting to cross them out with a pencil, to gouge them with its point. For the first time in his life he was living a public lie. With his father he had lived a lie for as long as he could remember: he believed his father wanted him to be popular and athletic at school, so Paul never told him about his days. But now the lie had spread: it touched his mother and Amy and Barbara and Brother Eugene and even Eddie. He hated the lie, not for its sin but for its isolation; and every Tuesday and Thursday he carried the horn to school as though it were a dead bird; and in the afternoons he climbed the stairs with Eddie to the band room and to Brother Eugene’s growing impatience; then entering his house he put the horn on the closet floor, wanting to kick it, and at supper he answered questions about his music lessons. After two weeks of practicing at home his father asked him, the gruff voice trying to be gentle and bantering, if he’d practice when he came home from school, not at night. As lovely as the French horn is, his father said, it wasn’t meant to accompany reading.
    Nor was anything else. When his father came home in the evenings Amy took her records off the record player. After supper, except during the Sunday night radio shows, the living room was quiet. If friends of Amy or Barbara came over they went to the girls’ bedroom and closed the door. The phone was in the hall and when Paul talked to Eddie at night he turned his back to the living room and spoke in a low, furtive voice. Lying in bed he could hear Mike scratching a flea, his father returning one magazine to the rack and getting another, his mother yawning in the chair where she read. But he was grateful for that silence resting on his horn too. He started practicing before his father came home; but if his mother was shopping or playing bridge he put the horn away and when she came home and asked if he had practiced he said yes. He saw the end coming.
    He did not know how it would come, and when it did he felt betrayed again: Eddie phoned Paul on a Wednesday night and said he wasn’t going to the lesson tomorrow, he was quitting.
    â€˜I haven’t enjoyed it very much,’ Eddie said. ‘Have you?’
    â€˜I don’t know. It hasn’t been so bad.’
    â€˜I’ve hated it. I don’t like the French horn. It’s big and clumsy and I don’t like the sound. I wish now I had taken the clarinet. Daddy says Brother Eugene used us, he talked us into the French horn so he’d have some for the band. He says if I want to take the clarinet after a while I can get lessons from somebody in town.’
    â€˜What about the horn? What are you going to do with the horn?’
    â€˜He’ll sell it back to the store.’
    The phone was outside his sisters’ room.